Imagine being forced to read a book where the pages are bound in a random order. Not a very pleasant prospect, but that's what we make our PCs and servers do every day. As files are added, modified, and deleted, the data on hard drives quickly becomes fragmented. And just as jumping around in the book will significantly slow us down, forcing the hard drive heads to bounce all over the disk slows your computer.

Windows has shipped with defragmentation tools to reorder data for years, but they've always been slow and lacking in depth. Executive Software's Diskeeper 6.0 Second Edition provides the answer. Diskeeper lets administrators centrally control and schedule defrag tasks on all the Windows servers and workstations on their networks. The program can be customized to exclude folders or certain file types, set priority levels, protect volumes from becoming fragmented, send alerts to the Event Log, and defragment system files during boot-up that you can not normally defrag while online. At $240 per server and $45 per workstation, there is no excuse not to have Diskeeper in your toolbox.